Monday, October 10, 2011

ld-http.so

In the last decade we have enjoyed a renaissance of programming language development. Clojure, Scala, Python, C#/F#/et al, Ruby (and Rails), Javascript, node.js, Haskell, Go, and the list goes on. Development of many of those languages started in the 1990s, but adoption accelerated in the 2000s.

Why now? There are probably a lot of reasons, but I want to opine on one.

HTTP is our program linker.

We no longer have to worry about linking to a gazillion libraries written in different languages, with all of the compatibility issues that entails. We no longer build large software systems by linking it all into ginormous binaries, and that loosens a straightjacket which made it difficult to stray too far from C. We dabbled with DCE/CORBA/SunRPC as a way to decouple systems, but RPC marshaling semantics still dragged in a bunch of assumptions about data types.

It took the web and the model of software as a service running on server farms to really decompose large systems into cooperating subsystems which could be implemented any way they like. Facebook can implement chat in Erlang, Akamai can use Clojure, Google can mix C++ with Java/Python/Go/etc. It is all connected together via HTTP, sometimes carrying SOAP or other RPCs, and sometimes with RESTful interfaces even inside the system.